Aims To examine whether and to what extent emotion reactions of nursing students are affected by emotional features inherent in nursing care situations, focusing on gender and aggression. Background How individual characteristics of nurse students interact with emotional demands inherent in nursing practice and modulate the way they are perceived and acted upon may have an impact on quality of patient care. Design Cross‐sectional study, conducted from May to September 2013. Methods Nursing students (N = 157) of the Nursing Degree Course of School of Medicine, Bologna University, completed self‐report questionnaires assessing individual differences (i.e. aggression, personality traits, empathy) and evaluated emotion‐inducing pictures of pleasant, unpleasant and neutral content. Results Gender and verbal aggression level modulate emotional responses of nursing students: females rated negative picture categories as significantly less pleasant than male students; those with high compared to low verbal aggression levels rated negative stimuli as less arousing and more pleasant. Verbal aggression level is positively related to physical aggression and anger and negatively related to emotional stability and empathy in both males and females. Conclusion High verbal aggression scores seem to be associated with attenuated arousal in response to emotional stimuli and decreased aversive reaction towards negative content pictures, indicating a potential facilitation of approach and management of adverse events strictly connected to nursing practice. Nonetheless, aggression can represent a risk factor in nursing practice. Negative implications of verbal aggression are highlighted together with the need for tailoring education programs aimed at enhancing emotion regulation and aggression management skills in nursing context.

Aim: Providing the same standard of care to all patients alike, regardless of race, gender, age or any other irrelevant characteristic is imperative in the healthcare profession. In this study we examined whether and to what extent unintentional evaluations based on facial appearance of others affect nursing students' readiness to approach them and provide nursing care. Method: A cross-sectional study was conducted from November 2018 to July 2019. Nursing students (N = 160) enrolled in the Nursing Degree Course of School of Medicine of Bologna University, completed a self-report questionnaire assessing personality traits and evaluated photographs of trustworthy, untrustworthy and neutral-looking male and female faces, while indicating their own approach behavior in a series of social interaction and caretaking scenarios. Results: Trustworthy faces elicited a higher approach readiness than untrustworthy and neutral ones across scenarios. Nonetheless, the nursing care scenario facilitated the approach toward others perceived as untrustworthy. Emotional stability trait further enhanced the approach of untrustworthylooking others and provision of impartial care. Conclusion: Present findings suggest that facial appearance bias among nursing students may be downregulated by activating cognitive representations of their professional role as future caretakers and their caretaking motivation. This speaks of the need to integrate as early as possible into existing nursing education programs simulation scenarios aimed to increase emotional awareness and model nursing students' future relational and caring skills.